


beat the odds together

by QueenWithABeeThrone



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/F, Fluff, Marriage Proposal, Post-Endgame, background stucky and pepperony, goose is better than a shotgun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 12:16:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19393954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/pseuds/QueenWithABeeThrone
Summary: Nick says, trying his damnedest to hide the gleeful mirth on his face, “You’d have better luck finding a Ring-Pop to propose to your girl with, Danvers.”“I take it back, retirement does not suit you at all,” says Carol, smacking her best friend (who she isn’t in love with or the stepmother of) on the shoulder. Nick, damn him, laughs like an asshole.or: Carol proposes to Maria. it takes some time, because she has to find a ring first.





	beat the odds together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [miriad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miriad/gifts).



> title is from Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One”. this is So Sappy.

“I need you to tell me how you proposed to Pepper,” says Carol, as she brusquely pushes the door to the lab open.

Tony will swear, up and down and to his dying day, that he jumped to his feet completely fine and did not send his daughter’s cereal bowl crashing to the ground after him. Morgan, Carol knows from experience with small children, will probably ( _absolutely_ ) say differently, and more truthfully:

When Carol Danvers walked into the room, Tony Stark, savior of Earth and Avenger, crashed to the ground in an undignified heap of three limbs, a cereal bowl, and an ungodly amount of milk.

“ _Warn a guy_ ,” says Tony, from the ground. He points at Morgan, who’s snickering at him, and says, “I’m gonna auction all your toys.”

“You say that all the time,” says Morgan, hopping off her stool. She’s so _little_ , she reminds Carol of Monica—smart and curious, keen to learn and keen to explore, absolutely got in here without express permission from either of her parents, completely aware of her ability to wrap her father around her little finger. “Hi, Captain Danvers.”

“Hey, Morgan,” says Carol. She rests an elbow on the workshop’s table and says, “Need a hand there?”

“Oh, no, I’m just bonding with the floor and my daughter’s Froot Loops here,” says Tony, the stump of his other arm wiggling a little. “Don’t mind me.”

Morgan laughs. Carol chuckles, a little, and holds her hand out for Tony to take. She hauls him up, not even giving his hand a small shock, because—well, her bad, after all, she did come in without warning. Besides, he’s only got the one hand. Probably why he’s letting Morgan eat her breakfast in here.

“Anyway, backtrack a little, Captain,” says Tony, brushing the Froot Loops off his tank. “What was that you were asking?”

“How’d you propose to Pepper?” Carol asks.

“You’re asking me?” Tony asks, incredulously.

Carol raises an eyebrow. “How many of the people we work with here are married?” she asks, counting in her head: there’s Steve and Bucky and whatever they have, but they haven’t sealed it yet with a ring and a kiss, legally. She can’t ask Drax, because his people tend to propose by cutting the heads off their beloved’s vilest enemies and making cups out of their skulls. She can’t ask Scott, because he’s nice and all, but he’s divorced and still working up the nerve to propose to Hope. Hank and Janet are busy globetrotting. Nick will laugh at her and she does not trust him not to tell Maria, just ‘cause he found it so funny. Barton is chilling on his farm and no one wants to pull him out of there. Pretty much everyone else she knows is single or still in the dating phase. (Or Spider-Man, who’s _a kid._ )

Which leaves Tony. And Monica, she supposes, but Monica’s too close to this.

Which, yeah, scraping the bottom of the barrel here in people to ask proposal advice from, but.

“You’re desperate,” says Tony.

“Astute,” says Carol. “I need proposal advice. You’re the only person I know who’s proposed to someone and hasn’t gotten divorced.”

“And—who’s this for?” Tony asks.

“You’ll find out,” says Carol. “Advice?”

“Well,” says Tony, after a moment. “I hate to disappoint you, but when I proposed to Pep it was kind of—spur of the moment? We had a press-con about Peter becoming an Avenger and when he didn’t, we had to fill it somehow, so.” He pauses, then says, “Did you have someone carrying a ring around for you for about eight years?”

Carol looks up at the stainless white ceiling, sighs deeply, then looks at Tony again. “Nope,” she says.

“Uncle Happy still has a spare,” Morgan volunteers.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Carol, reaching out a hand to ruffle Morgan’s hair.

\--

Happy does not have a spare.

\--

Carol didn’t realize she wanted to marry Maria after Thanos died.

Carol didn’t realize she wanted to marry Maria after the Snap.

Carol didn’t realize she wanted to marry Maria after her homecoming from the Kree.

Carol realized she wanted to marry Maria one night in September, back when they were still in denial that what they were doing in bed was more than just occasionally “fooling around” with each other. Monica was two and they’d only just gotten her to go to sleep. Carol had volunteered to wash the dishes, and let Maria tuck in early, take a well-deserved break from toddler-wrangling.

When she came back upstairs, Maria was passed out in bed, drooling into her pillow. Her hair stuck up every which way, and she snored worse than an oncoming train. She was sprawled over the whole bed, with no room for Carol left over.

She was the most beautiful thing Carol had ever seen, in that moment, and in all the moments before, and in all the moments after. She was the only person, Carol realized quite suddenly, that Carol would ever want to wake up next to for the rest of her life.

But they were still calling it “fooling around” at that time, and there was nothing Carol was more quietly scared of than losing Maria, because she went too far too fast. So she had only smiled and kissed her cheek, before wriggling in beside her and falling asleep.

Maria had been the one to break the silence, first, at least about their shared feelings. Maria had been the one to redefine their relationship, take it from simply fooling around to something _more_ , and Carol had bought a ring somewhere and—

Well. If this were a perfect world, she’d have proposed somewhere secret, and Maria would’ve said yes, and they would’ve laughed and kissed under the fading sunlight.

But the next day Lawson had asked her for that test flight.

Somewhere between Earth and Hala, Carol and Vers, she’d lost the ring.

\--

“Do you ever think,” Carol starts, swirling her drink around in her glass as Bucky hooks a foot around the leg of the stool next to her and pulls it out, “do you ever wonder—what if you never fell? What if HYDRA never took you?”

“Yeah, hi to you too, Danvers,” Bucky says, beckoning the bartender over to gesture to the whiskey. “The game was fun, the Dodgers got a well-deserved ass-whooping, I’ve been posing for Steve for his art school shit in between running around with Sam, what’s up with you?”

Carol smacks her hand against his flesh shoulder. He winces exaggeratedly. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m _fine_. Just—I’ve been doing some thinking about a few things, that’s all.” She sighs, and props a hand up on the counter, resting her cheek on her fist. “And I can’t come to Fury about it, because he’ll tell on me.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” says Bucky, as the bartender pours him a shot of whiskey.

“Yes, he would,” says Carol. “I’ve known him longer than you. He _would_.”

Bucky shakes his head in disbelief, and knocks the shot back.

They’ve got a weird thing going, her and Bucky, where they meet up sometimes and drink and talk. He’s a quiet, alert sort of person, mostly doesn’t pick fights but always _does_ finish them, and he generally moves with the same kind of precision and grace that Carol recognizes from Nick, from Natasha, from Maria: like he expects a fight from all directions, like he doesn’t quite trust his surroundings not to turn against him fast. Even here, in this shitty little dive bar halfway between New York and Louisiana, his body’s angled so he’s keeping the exits and entrances in sight.

She doesn’t need to, but he’s called her out on moving pretty much the same way for different reasons once: there’s power thrumming through her veins, ready to be unleashed at any second, because you _never know_ when the fight is going to come to you.

She swirls the drink in her glass around. It’s not going to do much for her, just as it’s not going to do much for Bucky, but it’s just an excuse to talk.

She lets out a breath. “I’m thinking of proposing to Maria,” she says. “I—actually bought a ring, but that was back in the eighties, right before. Well.” She points upward at the ceiling, and her finger glows slightly. “I had it in my pocket, and the Kree ended up taking it. Didn’t want me to remember I was human.”

Bucky looks down at his own glass, sighs, and says, “I didn’t buy a ring, but I did have a letter to Steve. HYDRA burned it—same reason why the Kree took your ring.”

“That is fucked up,” says Carol. “Did you write him a new letter, or—”

“I told him like a healthy person maintaining healthy relationships,” says Bucky. It sounds kind of like he’s parroting his therapist. “You tell her yet?”

“She knows I’m in love with her and we’ve _talked_ about getting married,” says Carol. “We have since I found out we _could_. I’m just trying to find an engagement ring.”

“Can’t ask anyone?” Bucky asks.

“Even if my parents weren’t dead,” says Carol, flatly, “I would still rather get a face full of Power Stone blasts than ask them for shit.”

Bucky winces. “Fair point,” he says. “Listen, this ring business—I can’t get in the middle of that with you and help you out any, finding one. But I can tell you: if you’ve both been waiting this long, you could propose to her with a Ring-Pop and she would still say yes.”

“I am _not_ proposing to Maria with a Ring-Pop,” says Carol.

\--

Nick says, trying his damnedest to hide the gleeful mirth on his face, “You’d have better luck finding a Ring-Pop to propose to your girl with, Danvers.”

“I take it back, retirement does not suit you at all,” says Carol, smacking her best friend (who she isn’t in love with or the stepmother of) on the shoulder. Nick, damn him, laughs like an asshole.

She finally gave up on keeping her search for the Perfect Ring a secret from him after two days of methodically searching through the jewelry stores of Louisiana by herself, and had been thoroughly annoyed to find out that Nick already knew. That’s what happens, she supposes, of letting her spy best friend get to the top of SHIELD twice over. Clearly he’s upped his game.

So now here they are in a jewelry store in a little corner tucked away somewhere in the midst of Manhattan, upscale and fancy, its necklaces and earrings and bracelets full of precious gemstones on full display.

“Um,” says the lady at the counter, blinking wide dark eyes at both of them. She looks a little out of place, like this is her first day on the job and she hadn’t expected _Avengers_ walking in. Carol gives her a casual, reassuring smile. “Aren’t you—”

“Nah, we just look like ‘em,” says Nick, smoothly.

“I’m here to get an engagement ring,” says Carol, a little distracted. There’s something on the edge of her hearing, something that’s putting her hackles up, something that has her tucking one softly-glowing hand away into a pocket.

Nick doesn’t miss it. He raises an eyebrow, questioning, but his hand drops to the holster on his belt.

“Uh, sure!” says the girl, oblivious. “What kind?”

Carol cocks her head to the side. Ah. Jewelry store robbers, but with superpowers—she hears the _whoosh_ of air, the sound of someone’s rubber soles skidding on the pavement, an urgent conversation being carried on outside. “How about whatever’s in the back?” she says, with a bright smile.

The girl scurries off to the back door, and Carol glances at Nick. “Super-speed?” she guesses.

“At least,” Nick says. “No collateral damage.”

“You don’t have to tell me like it’s a challenge,” huffs Carol, before she turns around just as one man in a Captain America mask phases right through the door, followed by two men in poorly-made costumes kicking it down, with very advanced-looking tech in their hands. “Nice toys,” she says.

“Oh, _come on_ ,” says Nick, annoyed, when he catches sight of the guns. “Pierce has a lot to answer for, that tech was supposed to be _hidden_.”

“Hands up!” says the tallest, in the Iron Man mask, thumbing back the safety. “Hand over all the money and the jewelry right now and we’ll let you live!”

“ _All_ ofitplease,” says the one in the Thor mask, his words tripping over themselves on the way out of his mouth. Carol glances down towards his rubber shoes, and the skid marks on the outside of them, and purses her lips. All right, this one and the phaser might be tricky—if they weren’t in such a cramped situation, she’d just blast all three.

Since they are, she just flicks a concentrated whiff of energy at the speedster, barely bigger than a finger. In a second, the speedster’s knocked into the glass, cracking it.

“Oh, _shit_ ,” says the man in the Iron Man mask, right before Nick flicks something at him as well. He goes down with a scream as electrical energy crackles around him, a little disk on his neck glowing red.

The phaser’s fast in his reactions, Carol will give him that—the next tiny photonic whiff she flicks at him goes right through his head like he’s not even there, and he pulls the trigger.

Nick yanks Carol to the side as the blast of purple energy slams into a jewelry case, and winces. Gems and jewels scatter all over the floor, and one of the two robbers on the ground moans in horror.

“I want it on the record it wasn’t me,” Carol informs Nick, getting to her feet.

“I’ll cover for you with the counter girl,” says Nick, pulling his gun out of the holster and thumbing the safety back. “Take those guns out first!”

“Those look like Chitauri tech,” says Carol, moving fast. Her first punch phases right through the guy’s chest, but when she pulls her hand out, the swing he aims at her face is solid and strong. All right—so he can phase _fast_ , but can he phase parts of his body at a time, or does it have to be the whole thing all in one go? And the gun, does it go with him?

One way to find out.

She knocks it out of his hand. With a curse, he swings again, but Carol sidesteps and grabs hold of his arm. She grins when she manages to grip onto clothes and flesh, and uses his momentum to swing him right into his friend in the Iron Man mask, just barely on his feet. They go down in a heap of flailing limbs, and Nick presses a knee into the phaser’s back. “You’re going to stay down,” he tells him.

Carol steps to the side, again, as the speedster tries to blur past her. She steps to the other side and sticks her foot out, watching the speedster trip and fall flat on his face. She crouches down, presses down on his back with her hand, and lets the power thrumming in her veins inch closer and closer to the surface.

The guy whimpers.

“I know, it’s pretty hot,” she says. “Listen, usually, my friend and I would just pack you all up and drop you off at the precinct, but I’ve got this girlfriend I _really_ wanna propose to, so.” She presses just the slightest bit deeper into his skin. “Where’d you get those guns?”

The phaser makes a terrible, horrified noise, and says, “Oh, _shit_ , we’re _fucked_.”

“Please don’t kill us,” the guy in the Iron Man mask says, his voice going up an octave.

“We’ll tell you!” the speedster gasps. His clothes aren’t even smoking, she’s just warming her hand up, but he’s _this close_ to peeing himself in his ridiculous spandex costume. “We’ll tell you, oh god just _please_ —”

Nick hums, in answer, and meets Carol’s gaze. Then he sighs and gets up. “It’s your lucky day, punk,” he says, helping the two of them back up as Carol pushes herself to her feet. She picks the speedster up, and only shocks his hand a little.

Then the counter girl, a ring box in her hand, says with her eyes as wide as teacup saucers, “Uh—what happened here?”

\--

Talos does not have a wedding ring. He doesn’t have an engagement ring either.

“We’re not big on rings here,” he explains, when Carol flies over to the Skrulls’ new home to check up on them. They’d been hit pretty badly by Thanos’ incredibly stupid and genocidal plan, and then to suddenly get all their losses back had been a pretty big shock to the system. Still, they’re troopers, or at least that’s the term Talos cheerfully uses when Carol asks. Honestly, she’d call them _survivors_ , determined to cling on to life and all the good times, so that when the end comes for them they’ll at least have made up for the years hiding in the shadows.

“I’ve seen you shift,” Carol says, lying on the grass with him. She feels gross and achey, but it’s the good kind of ache, her muscles sore from sparring. She likes sparring with Talos, he never tells her to control her emotions, he just plays dirty, shifts to someone she’ll hesitate to blast, and gleefully tackles her. “Your clothes shift with you.”

“It’s not the _shifting_ ,” says Talos, patiently. He’s somewhat bruised, but grinning too. “It’s—a culture thing, I suppose. I think the Skrull equivalent of an engagement ring and a wedding ring on Earth would be a marriage-dagger.”

“A _what_?”

“Marriage-dagger.” He pulls something out of his loose pants, spins it around his fingers. It’s not actually a viable weapon, Carol can tell, it’s more of a smooth obsidian triangle with a handle, with Skrull letters on the “blade”. “These days they’re just ceremonial, but once upon a time there used to be a real risk that your beloved would not actually be your beloved at the ceremony. So at the engagement stage we’d just exchange daggers with a code phrase that had to be said in a specific way in the blade, and if someone tried to impersonate the would-be spouse, we’d exchange daggers right back and say the phrase during the vows. If they didn’t know it, or if they said it wrong?” He mimes stabbing them. “Of course that’s not a real worry anymore, but, y’know, part of the culture and all.”

“Yeah,” says Carol, with a laugh. “Yeah, no, we don’t have marriage-daggers, although Monica’ll get a kick out of it, I bet.”

“I can give you the one from the first betrothal I had,” says Talos. “Apparently it was forged from metal that fell from the sky. For my money, they probably had some scraps lying around, but—” He shrugs, and smiles, nostalgic and a little sad. “I let myself believe them.”

“Did anything happen to them?” Carol asks, quietly.

Talos sighs. “Kree raid,” he says, somewhat reluctantly, and Carol’s heart twists into a painful knot. “Before your time. I never did get the dagger I made back. But if you want, that one’s yours.” He smiles, softly. “Better for it to be used for love than to just gather dust at home.”

“I don’t need a dagger,” says Carol.

“No,” says Talos, “but if you’re going to make a ring, you’re going to need some metal.” He gets to his feet, and holds a hand out for her to take. She grabs hold of his hand and lets him haul her up. “She’s a rare one,” he says.

“She’s the only one,” Carol corrects him, her lips quirking upward into a smile. “Thanks, Talos. For that and the spar.” Her smile turns cocky, and she adds, “If you could call _that_ sparring.”

“ _Hey,_ ” says Talos, with no real heat in his voice.

\--

Monica finds her in the shed and says, “Is that what I think it is?”

Carol flips up the visor, puts a non-glowing finger to her mouth and says, “Shh! Don’t tell her, _please_ don’t tell her.”

“Like I’m going to ruin the surprise,” huffs Monica, petting Goose, who meows contentedly in the spot he’s claimed in Carol’s makeshift workshop. She eyes the half-melted metal in a bowl and says, “Can’t you turn it up a little more?”

“I’d melt the bowl too,” says Carol, then: “Hey, how did your husband propose to you, anyway?”

“On a rocky cliff face overlooking a killer view,” says Monica, keeping a safe distance away from Carol melting the metal with her hand.

Carol thinks this over for a moment, then snorts out a huff of laughter. “Yeah, no,” she says. “There’s not a lot of views that can beat the one from outside the cockpit.” Except, of course, for when Carol turns her head to see Maria smiling at her, dark hair shot through with grey, eyes warm, the sun rising behind her. That could beat even the view from the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Why neither of you have proposed to each other in a plane yet I’ll never know,” says Monica.

“We’d both be flying the plane,” says Carol. “Can’t afford any distractions.” She squints at the bowl, the metal glowing red-hot as it melts into a puddle, and says, “If you were the one who proposed to your husband, what would you have done? Where would you have done it?”

“Taken him for dinner at the restaurant where we had our first date,” says Monica.

“The bar we had our first date at got turned into a hipster microbrewery a year ago,” says Carol, sourly. “It’s just not the same anymore.”

“You sound like my grandma,” says Monica, with a snort of laughter.

“Oh, _god_ , I do,” says Carol, horror dawning on her.

“Don’t worry about the first date thing, Auntie,” says Monica. “It’s more—something you guys have in common, I guess. People propose through video games, at baseball, at concerts, on Broadway, anywhere, as long as they’ve got that in common with each other. And you and Mom have a lot of things in common, and she’s in love with you.” She shrugs. “If you proposed to her in a shack, she’d say yes.”

“That’s the bottom of the barrel right there,” says Carol. “I want—I want it to be something memorable for her. I want her to remember how good it was, I just—I want it to be perfect.”

Monica stares at her, tilting her head. Carol catches the smallest, briefest hint of a sly smile, before Monica coughs and picks Goose up. “Well, good luck,” she says, turning around. “I’m gonna go threaten my niece’s boyfriend with a flerken, if you don’t mind.”

“Goose is not a weapon you can point at some pimply teen!” Carol calls after her. “He’s too picky! Use a shotgun like your mom would!”

\--

She means to just find something on Earth to use as a jewel, of course, despite a certain _someone_ (Tony, it’s usually Tony) joking about settling for nothing less than an Infinity Stone for her engagement ring. Nothing fancy, just a diamond or something.

But her comm pings her in the middle of the night, as she’s sleeping against Maria’s back. She comes awake fast, snapping her eyes open and blinking at the back of her girlfriend’s head, and sighs. Slowly, gently, she pulls her arm out from under Maria’s warm body, then sits up to take the comm in hand and read over the alert.

“Dammit,” she says, quietly.

“Somethin’ up?” Maria mumbles. The old bed creaks as she sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, the sheet falling down to her stomach. Carol’s breath catches in her throat again, as it always does around Maria, and she briefly entertains just wrapping her arms around her and going back to sleep. A night won’t hurt.

She waves the comm at her instead, because alerts like this mean she needs to go as soon as possible. “The Exandrians are calling,” she says. “World-ending threat, my help is needed, things like that. But they’ve got innate abilities like mine,” she adds, and even to her own ears it sounds remarkably flat for an excuse, “and contact with beings from another realm—”

Maria huffs out a breath, and shakes her head. “But you want to do what you can anyway,” she says.

Carol sighs. “Yeah,” she says. “I want to stay too, but I just—I can’t ignore this.”

In the dark, Maria smiles, and leans forward to press a kiss to Carol’s mouth. “Go,” she says. “Just come home as soon as it’s done. I’ll hold down the fort—been meaning to do a couple things, anyway. I hear Greg’s back from the dead.”

“Greg, the guy who still owes you five dollars?” Carol asks.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” says Maria, with a smirk. “Five years overdue, and I’m coming to collect.” She kisses Carol again, and this time it’s deeper, her mouth hot and wet and _god_ , Carol loves her, loves her smile and her voice and her laugh and her eyes and her body, everything about her. “Go save a world, Captain Danvers,” she says.

“I will,” Carol promises.

She takes the ring with her, when she flies out. This time, she keeps it hidden somewhere no one will ever find it.

\--

It takes two weeks for the threat to Exandria to be thrown back, and before she flies back, one of the defenders, a human with a shock of white hair and a blue coat, hands her a small chunk of translucent green stone. When she holds it up to the sunlight, the light breaks into a thousand different colors.

“Wow,” she breathes. “What is this?”

“Residuum,” says the man. “Unrefined, currently, but the refining process is simple enough.”

Carol turns it the other way, watching the colors. She doesn’t usually take gifts like this, priceless and rare, but an idea flashes in her mind. “Could you,” she says, finally, “make something small out of it? Say, something that could fit in a ring?”

“It would take a day or two,” says the man, slowly. “Is this for someone special, then?”

“Am I really that obvious?” Carol asks. “Yeah, it is.”

“It didn’t click until you said you wanted it to fit in a ring,” the man admits, holding up his own hand. A wedding ring sits snugly around his ring finger, the light glinting off the diamond. “I’ll make you something. Just let me borrow your ring—”

“How about I watch you at work?” Carol asks. “See this process for myself. Maybe I could speed it up a bit.”

\--

The process, with her helping, takes half a day. Carol takes off afterwards, and three days later lands in the backyard of her home with Maria. She pats her pocket with the ring inside it, then pulls out her key and slips into the kitchen.

Maria’s already sitting there, a cup of steaming hot coffee and an open velvet box in front of her. A diamond ring glitters in the sunlight.

“Hi,” says Maria, with a smile. “Greg’s a jeweler.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” says Carol, her keys dropping, clattering as they hit the floor. “Oh my god, this is—oh _shit_.”

The smile vanishes, and Maria gets to her feet. “Is something wrong?” she asks, concerned, moving towards Carol and taking her hand. “You okay? I didn’t know it was too fast—”

“I was going to _propose_ ,” Carol blurts, fumbling with her pocket as she tugs the ring out. She almost drops it, laughing, and then kneels down. “Let me do this properly, come on—”

“Oh my _god_ ,” says Maria, dropping to her knees too, trying to grab Carol’s face to kiss her, clumsy and adoring. Carol laughs, she can’t help it, and kisses her back. “Hold on,” Maria says, “hold _on_ —”

“Maria,” says Carol, “Maria, will you—”

“—yes, marry me, Carol, will you—”

“— _always_ , always, yes, marry me—”

“—of _course_ I’ll marry you, got me a ring from space—”

“—a ring from home—”

“—god, I love you,” says Maria.

“I love you too,” says Carol, and this is it, she’s never getting up off this floor, call it in for Captain Danvers. She kisses Maria again, and again, and again, glowing with love and laughter, home at last.

\--

“You knew,” says Carol to Monica. It’s six months later, and they’re at the courthouse, Carol in her most formal uniform and Monica in a blue-and-white dress with floral decorations.

“She told me first,” says Monica, smug.

“You could’ve said.”

“She pinkie-swore me to secrecy,” says Monica. “If it helps, she didn’t know you were planning to propose either.”

“You could’ve saved us a whole lot of trouble,” Carol says.

“Aw, but Auntie Carol,” says Monica, winking at her, “I’m Lieutenant _Trouble_.”

Carol opens her mouth to say something smart right back, but then she catches sight of Maria—beautiful, incredible Maria—clad in her own uniform, sunlight in her hair, stardust given human form. Her smile is a supernova, her eyes a galaxy, and Carol could wake up to the universe inside her forever, and always, and never get sick of her.

 _I do,_ she thinks, even before she says the words out loud, _I take you as my wife, I take you as my soulmate, I give you my heart and my soul in a ring now and forever, I do, I do._

\--

“I do.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [beat the odds together [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23398108) by [Fleur Rochard (fleurrochard)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurrochard/pseuds/Fleur%20Rochard)




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